Grifter's Game by Lawrence Block

to kill the crook. I had to make it look like a mob hit, professionally planned and professionally carried out. I had an untraceable gun, and that was the first step. There were other steps. But when they were done, it would be simple. It wouldn’t make page three in the Daily News . It would be on the front page, and it would say that a Westchester gangster with a solid-gold front had been bumped by the boys. The world would leave the widow alone. They’d feel sorry for her.
    They’d leave her for me.
    I opened my drawer, took another look at the gun, and smiled. I closed the drawer, left the hotel, grabbed lunch. Around three that afternoon I decided to call Brassard’s office and see if he was in. I looked through my wallet for his number, trying to remember whether or not I had jotted it down. I hadn’t, but I had four other numbers which I stared at for several minutes. Then I remembered copying them from a slip of paper in Brassard’s office.
    I called them in turn from a pay phone.
    The first two didn’t answer. The third was a bar on the East Side in the sixties, the fourth a Greek night club in the Chelsea district. I rang off on both of them.
    I guessed that the numbers were drops, contacts for Brassard’s heroin business. This didn’t do much for me one way or the other. It made it a little more certain Brassard was in the business, but I already knew that. I started to tear up the slip of paper, then changed my mind and returned it to my wallet.
    A phone book gave me his number. I dialed WOrth 4-6363 and let it ring itself hoarse. Then I hung up and went back to my room. I used a knife blade on the lock of the attaché case and it popped open in less than a minute.
    The package was still there.
    I looked at it, shook a little, put it back in the case and locked it up again. I dropped my penknife into my pocket and hefted the attaché case.
    I felt very shaky carrying all that heroin on the subway. But I managed it. I got off the elevator at the fifth floor, looking very much the picture of the aspiring young businessman. My suit was pressed and my tie was straight and my attaché case was held as casually as all hell. The door was open over at Zenith Employment but nobody was looking out of it.
    I let myself into Brassard’s office. I closed the door behind me and looked around. The office was unchanged. I browsed around carefully. The only thing missing was the slip of paper with the four phone numbers. I thought about that one for a minute and decided to do it up brown. I found a pencil in a drawer, then got the slip from my wallet and copied the numbers on his desk pad. I came as close to his handwriting as I could remember.
    Then I opened the attaché case again. I took out the small box of heroin lovingly and put it on top of the desk. Then I opened a desk drawer and took out four plain white envelopes.
    I filled each of them in turn about a third of the way with heroin. I sealed them, put three in the top center drawer and wedged one into the space between the desk blotter and the leather desk set that kept the blotter in place. I let the envelope stick out a bit. Then I opened one of the bottom drawers and put the big box of heroin in the back.
    That way, I figured, they’d have to look for it a little, and at the same time they couldn’t help spotting it. It was sort of like a treasure hunt for little kids. The first envelope was hanging there in plain sight. No detective could possibly miss it. The other three were in the center drawer, the first place they would look. After that, of course, they would turn the office upside-down and inside-out. Then they’d find the main box and the ball game would be over.
    Then the telephone started to ring.
    I turned green. I backed away from the desk as though it was wired for electricity. I flattened out against the wall for no imaginable reason and counted rings.
    It rang twelve times.
    Somebody was trying to reach him. Somebody who was fairly sure he